“Where did you learn to be so conniving?”

“Heartbeat?”

An Yu‍‌‍‍‌⁠‌​‌‌​⁠‍⁠‍​‍⁠​‍‍⁠‍‌ focused for a moment. “It’s not panic, sir.”

“Then what is it?”

Because I get excited at the thought of doing bad things.

An Yu discreetly dodged the dangerous question and explained, “Getting stopped by patrol teachers in the orphanage is common. If there’s any anomaly in the data, you’re taken away for check-ups, then dealt with.”

It was a brutal but effective management approach. But now, everything in the orphanage seemed to be shifting in an distorted direction.

According to the terminal’s scan, the patrol teacher was human. Yet she was calmly leading a group of aberrant children, with no signs of infection herself.

Qin Zhilu asked, “How long do you plan to keep me inside?”

An Yu snapped back to attention and replied quietly, “That depends on how angry you are.”

“Hm?” Qin Zhilu didn’t hear clearly. “What did you say?”

“I said I hope to show you my value again. Until I secure us a pass, I’ll protect you well.”

Qin Zhilu made no comment, simply instructing, “Turn on the recorder.”

“Oh.”

An Yu had nearly forgotten the small mechanical sphere.

A moment later, the live feed was transmitted to Qin Zhilu’s terminal, and he finally said, “Let’s go. Don’t deliberately avoid people.”

“Why?” An Yu asked, “People in the orphanage aren’t friendly. I’d rather avoid any early fights.”

Qin Zhilu spoke as if teaching him patiently, “Every time we enter a disordered zone, we need to assess how many people are mutated. If I recall correctly, the orphanage houses tens of thousands of children. Mutation is like opening a blind box. If most people mutated, then we have thousands of genetic blind boxes.”

An Yu was puzzled. “What’s a blind box?”

“A kind of lottery,” Qin Zhilu replied. “If we draw enough times, we’re bound to find what we need.”

An Yu didn’t entirely understand but decided not to press further—the Commander had once praised his high IQ. Right now, in the Commander’s eyes, he was disrespectful, had poor morals, and his gentle personality was questionable. It seemed that his only advantage was his high IQ, which he had to keep at all costs.

The snowstorm intensified. Unlike the fierce gales outside, this storm felt like it was never-ending and the whirling snow nearly obscured the buildings.

An Yu stood in the snow, feeling a bit drowsy—He couldn’t tell whether it was because he was hungry or he just wanted to sleep out of habit after being here.

As the mechanical sphere whirled around, Qin Zhilu asked, “Are all the buildings here gray and white?”

“They’re gray because they’re dirty. They were originally pure white. The managers wanted the snow to camouflage this place, reducing the risk of aberrant invasion—like the dome in the Main City.” An Yu answered while scanning the sparse buildings: “It might not be high-tech, but during my eight years here, I never heard of any mutant invasions.”

Suddenly, the team’s public channel crackled to life.

“We finally shook them off!” Fengjian Tenyu panted. “They chased us for forever! An adult leading a bunch of kids—no, mutant kids! Did you look up at the mirror? The enemy’s huge! Thanks to them, the area we were just now looks like a huge comet swept by.”

There was silence on the channel for a moment.

Jiang Xiao added, “Everyone, we’re at the orphanage’s southeast corner. Judging from the coordinates, Law and Corner are in the northwest, Slade in the southwest, and Pat in the northeast.”

An Yu, whose empty stomach had left him a bit dazed, suddenly looked up.

After three missions, Lady Luck was finally on his side—his old home was in the northwest corner, which meant the archives were nearby.

Slade’s voice suddenly cut in, irritated. “I almost got interrogated too. Our outsider’s clothes and gear stand out here; people keep asking questions. Why didn’t Corner warn us?”

A brief, awkward silence fell over the channel before Pat snorted, “Junior officer—are you worried we’ll steal your contribution points?”

An Yu didn’t respond and continued walking forward.

A low building appeared in front of him, with a sign with a rice bowl at the door. It was the canteen.

His stomach rumbled instantly.

Slade continued, “Law, kindly inform your supervision subject that no one here wants to compete with a senior officer or a junior officer for contribution points. Corner can stop being so….”

“The Commander’s channel is down,” An Yu suddenly interrupted him.

Slade was confused. “What?”

An Yu lied without changing his expression: “We got separated when we encountered a patrol teacher.  If you can connect to his frequency band, please send him my coordinates.”

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With that, he promptly closed the public channel and quickened his steps toward the cafeteria.

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Qin Zhilu seemed to chuckle lightly. “That’s up to you.”

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An Yu glanced over; it was Slade, as expected.

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“I’ll come to you,” Slade coughed twice over the channel. “I’m the closest to you. It’s safer to stick together.”

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Under the baptism of the snowstorm, those golden eyes were so clear that they made people feel chill, and the fleeting coldness in his eyes were sharper than the snow.

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“Mm.”

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The cafeteria was exactly as he remembered,  with no changes at all.

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He paused in thought. “Typically, this early phase lasts only a few days, yet their behavior suggests they’ve been mutated much longer.”

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He’d been gone for ten years, yet these people all still looked like children.

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An Yu remembered the prophecy poem titled “Asylum” and murmured, “Only by finding the archives room will we know what happened here.”

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“Coarse bread is only available in Bait City. On my first day at District 53, Ling Qiu was eating bread. It smelled so good. He even broke off half of it and gave it to me.”  An Yu said softly, “It was the first gift I’d ever received. After eating it, the more I thought about it, the weirder it seemed. I was so scared that I wanted to dig my throat to make myself throw up, but in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

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The Commander seemed especially fond of giving him things. He gave him a coat, bread, a short knife, his gambling profits, a fancy apartment, a ridiculously expensive octopus plush, and a glutinous rice snack in a mysterious black box after his gene injection.

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Ling Qiu was right; anticipation is a wonderful experience.

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There was silence in his earpiece; it seemed it had been quiet for some time.

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An Yu touched his earpiece. “Is it too stuffy in there?”

“A little. Find a quiet spot and restore the space to normal.”

“Then I’ll eat quickly,” An Yu said immediately.

He sat in a corner, finished his soup in a few gulps, and tore open the biscuit wrapper.

The whitish, palm-sized biscuits were rough and hard, and heavy like a brick.

An Yu tried to break it in half.

Qin Zhilu said, “I’m not eating that.”

An Yu stopped instantly. “Then I’ll eat it?”

“Mm,” Qin Zhilu said, “Eat slowly.”

The sound of chewing immediately came through the earpiece—like a small animal gnawing on tree bark, quiet yet determined.

While eating, An Yu kept an eye on his surroundings.

Over half the children here had already mutated. The one closest to him had a face full of ulcers, with small rotten, flesh-like flowers growing from the sores. A boy on his left had skin covered in bark-like wrinkles, while the one on his right had only four irregularly shaped fingers on each hand.

Human children would look down and walk around them, while the meal attendant stood nearby, observing calmly.

Qin Zhilu pondered aloud, “Perhaps these caretakers are under mind control and their previous ideas have been washed away, so they are not surprised.”

“Mind control?”

An Yu thought back to the absurd rumors on the forums.

Qin Zhilu explained, “Abilities also have levels, and only a select few of the Protectors and Super-Aberrants can awaken abilities related to the mind.”

“The Brain believes that mutation follows an invisible evolutionary chain. Low-level mutations, like District 53’s mantis and jellyfish types, only reflect the biological nature of fusion. As one moves up the chain, true abilities begin to appear—for instance, plants can attract insects, sap can heal wounds, and correspondingly, mutated beings awaken mind manipulation or healing powers.”

“Super Aberrants are even more complex and can influence space-time within a limited area. As humans explore this evolutionary path, the higher they go, the more difficult it is to explain distortions purely at the genetic level. The latest addition, Codex, for example, involves fusion between humans and inanimate objects.”

“So, the stronger the Protector, the closer they get to being Super-Aberrants,” An Yu replied. “They haven’t lost human will, maybe because they aren’t strong enough yet.”

“Mm.” Qin Zhilu’s tone was calm. “Rationally speaking, the higher one goes on the chain, the harder it is to retain human will. When there is no need to be a human being, one will naturally stop being a human being.”

As An Yu ate his biscuit, he thought there were two loopholes in this logic.

It was him and the Commander.

A commotion in the distance suddenly interrupted his thoughts.

He looked up and saw a familiar orphanage scene.

—three mutated kids were extorting “protection food.”

The boy with flowers growing out of his sores took the lead, tapping the table with thin fingers as he sneered, “You ate an extra bite.”

Two humans were being harassed; one had fresh, bloody wounds exposing red flesh.

Qin Zhilu murmured, “Almost all the human children here have injuries.”

An Yu glanced at his neatly bitten biscuit. “Yes, bullying is common.”

The orphanage had never been a paradise. The cruelty here was even less concealed than in the slums. No normal child would want to stay; they would rush to apply for transfer to Bait City once they survived the observation period.

In the whole cafeteria, there was only one uninjured human, the other boy being bullied, around thirteen or fourteen years old. He said to the boy with flowers, “He didn’t mean to eat an extra bite; he just took a slightly bigger last bite. Let it go.”

“Y-yes… I didn’t mean to,” the boy stammered, trembling as he shrank back, his face pale.

The flower boy sneered, as two thorned vines sprouted from his face, one wrapping around the boy’s wrist and the other covering his mouth.

“MMMN—MMM—” The boy was hoisted into the air, struggling painfully until blood dripped down the vines, and then he was roughly thrown to the ground.

It took him a long time before he tremblingly knelt down, his knees pressing on the bloodstains on the ground as he shook and didn’t dare to look up.

“Tomorrow,” the flower boy said, “I’ll be keeping a close eye on you.”

He turned and coldly warned the uninjured boy, “0914, stay out of it.”

0914 didn’t answer but quietly helped the fallen boy up.

The collection of “protection food” continued as they stopped in front of each human child, who would immediately hold out half a biscuit with both hands.

Qin Zhilu suddenly remarked, “Except for you and 0914, all the humans only ate half a piece.”

Without a word, An Yu hid the mechanical sphere behind his back, just as the camera panned over the table.

—On the table lay half a biscuit, even more precisely and neatly than what the other children left behind.

“Not except me,” he said softly.

He would bite off half a cookie,  exactly half, neither more nor less—if he ate more, he’d get beaten; if he ate less, he’d lose.  This was a survival skill he had been trained in since childhood.